Posts Tagged: ohio

This is a followup to Emilia’s previous post and it makes me want to weep with gratitude. This is one way we can change things. —M.R. By Emilia Juocys Last weekend I went to Columbus, Ohio, to help my friend Tricia Keels run her Backyard Kids’ Restaurant. To see a suburban backyard transform into a restaurant is amazing, and to watch all the children and parents participate in this event is inspirational. The energy level is so high and it’s such a positive affirming experience. Plus, I get to teach both children and adults about food! For this year’s menu we offered house-made Italian sausages, Swedish meatballs, an insanely good Swedish meatball gravy (beef demiglace, sautéed onions, vermouth, cream), cucumber salsa, a jumbo Glad bag of tortilla chips, black beans, pickled okra, lots of grilled vegetables, house-ground flour pancakes, local blueberry Read On »

I’ve long said the way to help change the way America eats is to teach kids to cook. This is a story from my colleague Emilia in which kids not only cook, but rather take it to a new level, using cooking to bring a community together.—M.R. By Emilia Juocys I met Tricia Keels at Eat Retreat in the summer of 2014. Both from the Midwest (she from Ohio and I Michigan) and sharing a passion for food, we immediately hit it off. She briefly mentioned her nonprofit Souper Heroes and this “kid-run restaurant” her family throws in their backyard once a year. But with everything going on at the retreat, the thought slipped away. Until I got a call from her last August with the words, “I think we need your help.” The Keels Backyard Restaurant was born Read On »

The opening of a grocery store in what had been a derelict Beaux-Arts masterpiece is not simply a boon for residents of downtown Cleveland, it’s a great symbol of the importance of food to our communities. Hundreds of people came out for the 6-minute ribbon-cutting ceremony and to check out the newest resident. I asked Donna to join me and take some photos to document opening day (all photos here are hers). Does anyone know of a cooler grocery store in the country? If so, please tell me where! Our local paper, The Plain Dealer (still the best-named paper in the country, though its plain dealing has been reduced to four days a week on actual newsprint), had the day well covered. Our estimable architecture critic covers it incisively here, and does not hide his Read On »

Thomas Herbruck’s father came home with a still when Tom was 15; at that tender age he would distill his first spirits along with helping his father make wine from the grapes grown on their one-acre vineyard in Gates Mills, on the east side of Cleveland, Ohio. He would go on, happily, to become a 401(k) plan consultant at a brokerage company here and, with his wife Lianne, father of four. In 1991, Tom bought a 50-gallon prohibition-era moonshine still from a New York farmer. It was just too cool not to. By 2008, he’d navigated the bureaucratic waters of making spirits legally in Ohio, just for home consumption and for friends and others who might share his passion for distilling fermented liquids. But interest was great, and he’d jumped through enough legal hoops that he was Read On »

Earlier this summer, I met a friend out in Chagrin Falls, Ohio. (Could a novelist invent a more unlikely name for a town?) It’s semi-rural and on the edge of rural, a quaint town with an actual falls, a candy shop, and Jeni’s Ice Cream. Head out of town, south, and you’re quickly passing farmland. This is where my friend wanted to take me. Just over the edge into the next county, Geauga, off the road a bit, so removed we passed the drive and had to circle back, is a house, a small distillery, and a barn filled with barrels. The distillery is called Tom’s Foolery, started by Tom Herbruck, who, with his wife, Lianne, and their kids, make some exquisite applejack, America’s first commercial spirit, and likely the common drink in the new colonies in Read On »